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It’s the end of the semester at the University of Minnesota, the “teaching” component of my co-teaching the PhD development microeconomics course with Paul Glewwe has hit its apex, the MIEDC conference will be held on campus next weekend, and then a good friend will be visiting us for a few days, all which means that I have been too busy to write posts.

Posting will resume the week of May 12. For those of you in academia, good luck with the end of the academic year!

A very interesting new NBER working paper (see here for an ungated version) by Busso and Galiani says yes and no, respectively:

This paper provides the first experimental evidence on the effect of increased competition on the prices and quality of goods. We rely on an intervention that randomized the entry of 61 retail firms (grocery stores) into 72 local markets in the context of a conditional cash transfer program that serves the poor in the Dominican Republic. Six months after the intervention, product prices in the treated districts had decreased by about 6%, while product quality and service quality had not changed. Using a theoretical model, we arrive at the conclusion that the poor segments of the population in these markets care the most about prices and much less about quality. Our results are also informative to the design of social policies. They suggest that policymakers should pay attention to supply conditions even when the policies in question will only affect the demand side of the market.

Twitter is a great social medium for academics.

Really: My presence on Twitter over these past three years has given me a few research ideas, it has allowed me to meet a number of like-minded academics I would otherwise not have met, and it has given my research more attention from other researchers and policy makers than it otherwise would have received.

In short, Twitter is an excellent means of keeping one’s thumb on the pulse of one’s interests–in my case, agriculture, development, and food policy.

The foregoing is true most of the time. Sometimes, Twitter is where hope goes to die simply maddening. I will simply leave this exchange — which I had last Thursday on Twitter — here for posterity, without any further comment. Just know that the first tweet was responding to someone who was saying that she was now consuming an all- (or maybe it was mostly) organic diet–and that my last tweet in this exchange went unanswered.